Things have been a little tense between me and my Tasmanian correspondent lately. Normally I sit smugly in a justified zone of self satisfaction due to the fact that I live in New South Wales and she's barely clinging on to the world down in Tasmania. Now with COVID ravaging my state she has been gleefully informing me of her weekend trips around the more photogenic parts of Tasmania while I've been checking the five kilometre limit to see if I can actually go shopping.
It is a measure of my desperation that I contacted her the other day to see if she had anything that could possibly count as news.
"Will you stop bothering me," she demanded wearily. Apparently all of that travel around the Tasmanian bush wears you out. "Honestly, I don't know why I work for you."
"You work for me because it's court ordered community service and you have another seven hundred years to go. Now, what's the exciting news from Tasmania?"
"We've got blue tongues."
"Is that some sort of a dietary deficiency?"
Once she finished swearing my correspondent informed me that she had recently taken ownership of a pair of blue tongued lizards. This along with a couple of mad dogs, a bathtub full of fish and a goldfish that periodically fakes its own death. It wasn't easy, oh no. Before you're allowed to care for blue tongued lizards you have to complete a form assuring the government that you're competent to look after such valuable slivers of Australian wildlife. There wasn't any actual exam or anything you just fill out the form and they toss the lizards at you on your way out the door.
So now my correspondent had two lizards or, as her dogs refer to them, brunch. They reside in a tank in the hopes that the more canine members of the family will consider it slightly too hard to tear them to pieces.
"What about your daughters?" I asked.
"Oh the dogs can tear them to pieces if they like."
After a brief period of explanation (and a surreptitious call to Child Services) I gleaned the information that her daughters were actually delighted with the new additions to the household despite the fact that every new pet reduces the amount of space they have to live in. My correspondent is equally delighted for reasons she wasn't quite able to explain. She acquired her new pets in the way she acquired all the rest. Somebody else wanted to get rid of them. At this point I rather suspect there's a facebook page somewhere in Tasmania informing the citizens that if they want to dump random animals they should just contact my correspondent.
Never one to miss an opportunity I tried to encourage her to adopt an octopus. Unfortunately it appears that hyper intelligent invertebrates is where she draws the line. She's afraid that it will get out of its tank and wander at night (don't laugh, this is a very real possibility). Since my principal reason for making the suggestion was a hope that together they could re-enact that iconic scene from Alien I didn't have much to say. Sadly with a house groaning with animals it looks like the octopi will be left out in the cold.
On the plus side my correspondent is now fully authorised to care for reptiles of the non-venomous variety. To care for the venomous ones you have to fill out a different form and hopefully take some kind of test. With my octopus hopes dashed I did suggest a snake but apparently all of Tasmania's snakes are venomous and my correspondent is tired of filling out forms.
"So, to recap," I said, "you're spending your weekends travelling around the state and in between you're raising children, dogs, fish and lizards. Is that a correct summation of your life?"
"Jealous?" she asked.
"Kinda, yeah."
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